Tessa Lynch’s booth for Patricia Fleming at NADA New York introduces the artist’s unique collaborative creative processes, suspended somewhere between performance art, sculpture and print-making. A set of 16 collagraph and relief-printing plates, Made on the Table, is joined by two of Lynch’s Selfie sculptures, suggesting pencil sketches rendered in
wood. To the fore rests the metal-plated Tote Bag, stuffed with a cagoule and with fake-rain coating. Accompanied by an improvised performance work with Rhona Warwick Paterson, these pieces reflect Lynch’s long-held concerns with expressing the relationship between civic planning, architecture, access and emotional response, while emphasising forms of hidden and collaborative labour, including that undertaken by women.
Born in Epsom, England in 1984, Lynch graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2007 with a BA in Tapestry, receiving her MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2013. She often works in collaboration, recalling the spirit of classic post-conceptual collective actions such as those realised through Cal Arts’ Feminist Art Program. Lynch weaves across and between the boundaries separating artistic creation from domestic and manual work. The performed aspects of her oeuvre offer an open-ended, often satirical adjunct to her sculpture and print-making. The idea of the flâneuse is a touchstone for Lynch’s work, set apart from the privileged male figure of the flâneur.
Centred within Lynch’s booth is a series of ink-stained printing plates, created to make collagraph and relief-print images for artist and writer Rhona Warwick Paterson’s 2022 publication Made on the Table. This book was made during Warwick Paterson’s residency at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), for which she set up a kitchen table-cum-studio space within the gallery, playing on the overlaps between creative and domestic labour with a nod to Eva Hesse’s coffee-table studio space. Warwick-Paterson invited collaborators including Lynch into this space to talk, create small clay models and make new writings using the Exquisite Corpse method of surrealist poem-generation.
